Mark Buckingham Replies To Bill Willingham's Announcement On The End Of Fables

Fables Comes to an End With Issue 150.

After more than ten years of publication, and hundreds of issues of Fables, and various Fables-related works, I have decided the time has come to begin the process of bringing our sweeping story to a close. And, along the way, I've decided to retire from a great deal of my comics work.

Retirement in the storytelling trade means, still working and writing every day, but being a bit more selective in what projects I take on. Pushing 60, I thought it would be a good time to start making concrete plans for those remaining good writing years.

Fables will end with Issue 150, which will be a larger than usual size, as were many of the other milestone issues. Fairest, our companion series, will also come to an end just before the big final Fables issue.

Both DC and I will announce more details later on, but first and foremost I wanted to let our wonderful readers know about this as soon as I could, and note that our story plans leading up to Issue 150 made it increasingly clear that this upcoming saga should naturally be the final story.

Of course Mark is already well aware of this and said, "I respect Bill's decision and am looking forward to working with him on the book's epic final year, leading to the series' grand finale."

Newsarama is going to have more details, and I'll link to their story as soon as it's ready to go.

Let me restate my thanks to the best, sustained readership in all of comics. I promise to do my best to make the coming year in Fables a great one.

And now Mark Buckingham has released the following to Bleeding Cool in response;

Bill wrote to me to tell me that he was at a point in his career where he felt he wanted to retire from regular deadlines and monthly schedules, and to finally address some of the other projects he had long wanted to do. He had a plan to end Fables with a final epic story running up to Fables #150. I completely respected Bill decision, and even though I've enjoyed every minute of working on Fables I understood that it was time to say goodbye.

With this end point set, Bill then talked to me in depth about of our plans for the final year and a half of Fables, and how to give our loyal readers the best possible epic to end our tale.

I believe that Bill and I will work together again in the future, although there are no specific plans as yet. We have always enjoyed working as a team and it would be a pleasure to work with him again.

Fables has been such an integral part of my career that I will miss it as much as our most devoted fans, but I think that for now the focus should be on giving FABLES the best possible ending that it's readers deserve.